Lucia, recently widowed, is the newcomer to the village of Tilling and eager to wrest the reins of social supremacy from the incumbant Miss Mapp and install herself as its benevolent dictator. In their polite acts of sabotage and ruthless jockeying for the position of cultural arbiter Mapp and Lucia tear up the conventions of drawing-room bridge evenings as their deadly weapons. Things finally come to a head with Miss Mapp's audacious attempt to steal her rival's celebrated Lobster a la Riseholme. E.F. Benson's charming satrical bent turns the pretensions and snobberies of English village life into a vicious comedy.

First in a trilogy, Merry Hall is the account of the restoration of a house and garden in post-war England. Though Mr. Nichols's horticultural undertaking is serious, his writing is high-spirited, riotously funny, and, at times, deliciously malicious.

Few aristocratic English families of the twentieth century enjoyed the glamorous notoriety of the infamous Mitford sisters. Nancy Mitford's most famous novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, satirize British aristocracy in the twenties and thirties through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modelled on Mitford's own. The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

Our Final Party for Connect Your Summer is tomorrow. There will be so many wonderful things to see and do. You can see how much fun I had last year at the party, and I heard a rumor that there may be a few Star Wars characters walking around again. I am looking forward to celebrating another fun Connect Your Summer, and hope to see you at the party tomorrow.

While I had so much fun participating in CYS this year (I managed to read all about bears), I'm already looking forward to fall and more new books. So don't forget to stop inside the library before or after our party to check out just a few more books to get you through until school starts again. Some of my favorite non-bear picture books this year have been:

Eschewing female stereotypes throughout her early years and failing to gain acceptance on the boys' baseball team, Liz learns to embrace her own views on gender as she comes of age, in an anecdotal graphic novel memoir.

The unlikely friendship between basketball team captain Charlie and robotics club president Nate is challenged when Nate declares war on the cheerleaders over funding that will either pay for new uniforms or a robotics competition.

Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived.

"April Sinclair would like to blame someone for her mostly miserable life, and since her parents won't take responsibility, she blames the stork. Her teenage years kick off with a humiliating 13th birthday party, where one of her younger sisters reveals April's crush and the other puts on a show of peeing behind a tree like a boy. April can't wait to disown her loony family for a few weeks of summer camp with her two best friends. Meanwhile, she gets her first two kisses--from two different boys--and isn't sure how she feels about either one. But she's sure how she feels (horrified) when her parents cancel her camp plans in lieu of a family RV trip. Is there any silver lining to her summer?"--.

Maybe you want to read Sisters. Or maybe you love her work on The Baby-Sitters Club. Maybe you have no idea who Raina Telgemeier is, but you want a bright and fun graphic novel, and the ones your friends talk about are always checked out. Here is a list of Telgemeier's books (including alternative formats to check out), the popular titles that are just like Telgemeier, and some other suggestions for when those aren't available. Good luck, and happy reading.

Callie rides an emotional roller coaster while serving on the stage crew for a middle school production of Moon over Mississippi as various relationships start and end, and others never quite get going.

In a semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Raina's disappointing bond with a cranky, independent younger sister is further challenged by the arrival of a baby brother and an estrangement in their parents' marriage.

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante' s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.

For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children-- Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six-- in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty's parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she's worked for and her family's fragile hopes for the future.

From the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Sister comes a compelling, thrilling story of a mother who will do anything to protect her child. The school is on fire. Her children are inside. Grace runs toward the burning building, desperate to reach them. In the aftermath of the devastating fire which tears her family apart, Grace embarks on a mission to find the person responsible and protect her children from further harm. This fire was not an accident, and her daughter Jenny may still be in grave danger. Grace is the only one who can discover the culprit, and she will do whatever it takes to save her family and find out who committed the crime that rocked their lives. While unearthing truths about her life that may help her find answers, Grace learns more about everyone around her -- and finds she has courage she never knew she possessed. Powerful and beautiful, with a riveting story and Lupton's trademark elegant style that made Sister such a sweeping success, Afterwards explores the depths of a mother's unswerving love.

Lots of fun reads, but if you have time for only one read make it Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a balanced report on our growing reliance on the internet with a brief history of reading, books, and libraries.

When a young woman is found brutally murdered, and the DCI in charge is unable to take up the case, the role is passed on to Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, the first female DCI to handle such a responsibility. Between a slippery suspect and resistence from her team of detectives, Tennison has her hands full.

Shot down over Siberia in what was to be a simple meet-and-greet-mission, ex-Justice Department agent Cotton Malone is forced into a fight for survival against Aleksandr Zorin, whose loyalty to the former Soviet Union has festered for decades into an intense hatred of the United States. Before escaping, Malone learns that Zorin and another ex-KGB officer, this one a sleeper still imbedded in the West, are headed overseas to Washington D.C. Inauguration Day -- noon on January 20th -- is only hours away. A flaw in the Constitution, and an even more flawed presidential succession act, have opened the door to political chaos and Zorin intends to exploit both weaknesses to their fullest. Armed with a weapon leftover from the Cold War, one long thought to be just a myth, Zorin plans to attack. He's aided by a shocking secret hidden in the archives of America's oldest fraternal organization, the Society of Cincinnati, a group that once lent out its military savvy to presidents, including helping to formulate three covert invasion plans of Canada. In a race against the clock that starts in the frozen extremes of Russia and ultimately ends at the White House itself, Malone must not only battle Zorin, he must also confront his deepest fear, a crippling weakness that he's long denied but one that now jeopardizes everything..

Still mourning the loss of her brother, Ellie encourages the carving talents of his friend, Lloyd, while working at a gift shop in town. But his father disapproves. Every week, Hannah brings home-churned butter to market, and Ezra purchases some. Is he in the market for love? Embarassed by shattering a jar of beets at the Combination Store of Bee County, Texas, Isabella doesn't expect the handsome manager's frosty reaction. And, working together at the Old Amish Mill, Stella and David must find out what's behind strange happenings there..

In the late eighteenth century Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman, makes his way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest he is charged with cleaning. Rene marries an Indian healer with children already, and they have more, mixing the blood of two cultures. Proulx tells the stories of the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of two lineages, the Sels and the Duquets, as well as the descendants of their allies and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing stunningly brutal conditions-- accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, the revenge of rivals.